This past Tuesday, my day ended completely differently than I had planned at the start of the day. I’m deathly afraid of public speaking and my sense of humor is dead-pan at best, so I would have never imagined myself standing in front of a stage of people doing a stand-up comedy set. At 5:30 AM when I went to work, I was scrolling through my socials on the bus and stumbled upon an event at a local restaurant called Herb and Wood. The event was a “Worst Date Ever” themed storytelling competition. Ironically, the prize was dinner for two at said restaurant. Maybe it was the prospect of free food, or perhaps the tiredness of waking up at 4:45 AM for work, but I ended up submitting a set a mere 10 hours before the event.

I really enjoyed the experience so much! I had absolutely no expectation coming into this event, other than to enjoy myself and have a few laughs with my friends. However, I ended up winning $150 of dinner so it was 100% worth the 10-minute stand-up set I threw together in a matter of hours. But, my biggest motivation to sign up was to challenge myself to be out of my comfort zone and maybe learn a new skill. While I don’t really believe in New Year’s resolutions, at the beginning of the year I always say to myself that I will try something new each month because I never know until I try it if I would be any good. This has led me to discover so many of my current passions and hobbies like cooking, powerlifting, and now maybe even stand-up comedy!

This mindset really reminded me of a lot of Kant’s perspective on untapped talents. He states in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, it is failing to do your duty when “[one] finds himself in comfortable circumstances and prefers to give himself up to pleasure than to trouble himself with enlarging and improving his fortunate natural predispositions” (74). He argues that it is a disservice to yourself to not try and see what talents you have the potential to love. If you go in without any sort of intention of winning (like I did) and do something new purely out of wanting to be happy, even if you fail, it is still morally good to have tried at all. So, I encourage you all to try something out of your comfort zone (maybe even once a month!)

Below, you can see a brief video of me mentioning UCSD as part of a bit 🙂